“When a writer is born into the family, the family is doomed.” – Czesław Miłosz

The moment you start writing honestly from your own life, you will eventually write toward someone you know. A friend. A parent. An ex. Someone whose number is still in your phone. And at some point, mid-draft, or at the moment of publication, or somewhere between, you will face the question every writer working in memoir, autofiction, or lived experience eventually faces: Do you give people a heads up? Do you let them read it? Have you had any fallout from anything you’ve written?

There is a New York Times piece called Who Is the Bad Art Friend? that illustrates what happens when this question goes unasked. Two women, both writers, are friends. Something happens to one of them. The other writes about it, the story gets picked up, and the woman whose life supplied the raw material gets upset. To make her case, she goes out and tells the story herself, pitching the article that eventually runs in the New York Times. In doing so, she relays her friend’s story too, including the details of the published piece.

What that story perhaps inadvertently demonstrates is that there is only one misstep you can make when you are the subject of someone else’s art—and that is to react negatively to it. Because the person whose own story was stolen, one could argue, was also telling her friend’s story when she pitched that article. She felt she now had the right to. In responding, she became exactly what she resented.

The prevailing narrative (and it may explain why autofiction is so popular right now) is that your experience is your story. Your account of that marriage, that friendship, that family, belongs to you. The fact that someone else was present, and that you happen to hold opinions of them they might not welcome, does not revoke your right to your own experience of events. Consider portraiture: when people of a certain class were painted and the result displeased them, even in cases of strict realism, there were often grave consequences for the artist. Features were idealized, unflattering details omitted, things the subject felt self-conscious about quietly erased. 

The desire to control one’s own image is ancient. Doing this now—writing from your own experience, on your own terms—is nothing new. And the prevailing argument is that you should not give a damn about the discomfort it causes. This is, after all, why writers pursue autobiographical territory in the first place. The work that comes from real life, from people you have actually loved and fought with and lost, tends to be the work that resonates most deeply, both for the writer and the reader. The discomfort it causes is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It is often a sign that something has gone exactly right.

The Knausgaard Concession

That said, it is genuinely difficult to hold a completely no-fucks-given position. The guilt that arrives when someone is hurt by what you have written is real, and pretending otherwise is unrealistic.

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, six novels rooted entirely in his own life, called novels because of the way he sequences and patchworks his experience, is among the most discussed examples of autobiographical fiction drawn from life. When the fallout came, it arrived from an unexpected place. Not from the people closest to the events, but from his uncle, who objected to Knausgaard’s depiction of his father’s death. The uncle being the father’s brother—someone not particularly central to the narrative. 

The lesson is worth absorbing: whoever gets upset about what you’ve written is probably not going to be the person you expect.

There is real wisdom, then, in taking some care—in bringing your manuscript to someone close to the material before anyone else reads it and saying, with genuine openness, that you want to know how they feel. That conversation will likely be hard. Depicting difficult things honestly is always hard. But the people in your life who can respond with “Well, that’s your experience” are offering you something invaluable. And if you approach the work with enough craft and nuance, if you resist the urge to flatten people into two-dimensional versions of themselves, you will honor yourself as an artist as well as those people as individuals. A commitment to complexity, in the end, both elevates your art and provides forgiveness to its creator.

Worth knowing as well: the people you never intended to write about will sometimes find themselves in the work anyway. Someone in your life may become convinced that a character, a scene, or an observation is about them, when it is not. No amount of reassurance will shift that interpretation if they have already decided. The art form is so personal, so finely zoomed in on the details of a life, that it invites projection. Plan for it. There will be fallout if you are writing things that try to push boundaries or say something true. That is, in a way, evidence that the work is doing its job.

Before You Worry About the Fallout

Here’s what most people don’t want to contend with: writing about people in your life requires a stomach for it, especially while those people are still in your life. It is silly to assume there won’t be an issue. There may well be an issue. But maybe there won’t be—and either way, you should be prepared for the possibility that someone does not like the way they were depicted.

That preparation starts with a clear distinction between two separate acts: writing and publishing. The question of how to depict real people is a great question to ask—but not when you are creating the work. When you are creating, if there is a barrier keeping the work out of the notebook, you remove it. The concern about fallout, about hurt feelings, about someone seeing themselves in your pages—that is a publishing question, not a writing question.

Think of your notebook as a processing machine. It is not a statement. It is not an accusation. It is the place where you find out what you actually think. You can always choose not to publish. Writing it is the essential act; publishing is secondary. When you find yourself hesitating—worried that putting it on the page makes it real, that writing this thing means owning it—remember that the notebook exists precisely for that. You write it down. You find out what it is. Then you decide what to do with it.

Just Say It

The place where writers run into genuine, warranted trouble is not in writing about the people they love—it is in approaching that writing with a predetermined verdict. Writing from a position of “I have a thesis about the way this person behaved and I intend to prove it” serves neither the work nor the subject. If the driving impulse behind your memoir is to establish that your mother was unkind without any willingness to understand her more fully in the process of writing, you are likely neither honoring yourself as an artist nor that person as a human being. You are, at that point, simply making a case, which is action better suited to private conversation.

Favoring complication over simplicity is the artist’s instinct. When the work endeavors to show that life and relationships and interpersonal dynamics are complicated, the question of whether someone might be offended recedes. Doing due diligence as a person—showing care, approaching subjects with nuance, resisting the urge to settle scores—creates the conditions in which the art can take precedence over the complaint. A writing coach working with you in this territory can help you find and hold that line: the line between writing that processes and writing that prosecutes.

And more often than you might think, the person you were most worried about will never read it anyway! So many writers have felt nervous about someone getting offended by their writing, only to discover that they don’t read it, they don’t particularly care, and aren’t invested in art in the way assumed. The fallout may never arrive.

The practical guidance, then, is this: write it first and worry about the consequences later. Not because the consequences don’t matter, but because the writing has to exist before any other question becomes relevant. Approach your subjects with nuance. Resist the thesis. Let the complexity of real people do what flat characters cannot. And then, if you are going to say something, just say it.

Ready to write the people in your life with honesty and craft? Hewes House works with writers navigating memoir, autofiction, and the complicated territory in between. Explore our coaching services to find the support that meets you where you are.